


Chain Link

by Raven_Ehtar



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Canon - Manga, Gen, M/M, Survivor Guilt, fragileshipping, implied suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 13:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11358813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raven_Ehtar/pseuds/Raven_Ehtar
Summary: After the trouble with his darker half and the RPG game, Ryou is left wondering about himself and the precise nature of his relationship with the spirit of the Millennium Ring. Yami Yugi finds him and seems to understand exactly what's going through his head.





	Chain Link

Ryou looked out over the tops of the buildings around the school, at the limited bit of Domino City’s skyline that could be made out from where he stood on the roof of the high school. He threaded his fingers through the chain link around the edge of the roof meant to prevent any accidents. The school couldn’t prevent its students from coming up here, so they did their best to make sure they remained safe when they did. Ryou looked down to the ground, judging the kind of fall someone would take if they fell from the edge. It was three stories, high enough to severely injure or even kill someone if they dashed their head against the concrete. He supposed that would be one way to leave the school. 

He closed his eyes and leaned forward, his forehead pressing against the cold metal links. A cold breeze picked up, brushing over his face and ruffling his hair. As the fence pressed into him, Ryou became more and more aware that the only thing holding him back from a forty foot plunge was the chain link, a flimsy fence that bowed and swayed with his weight. It wasn’t much assurance, and yet he trusted it to keep him safe. And if it should suddenly give away…

Technically he shouldn’t be up here. The school bell had rung and most of the student body had already left for home. Some had remained behind for various club activities - he could hear shouts from one of the athletic clubs on the field - for committees or to clean up before going home. Ryou was a part of none of them, and yet he remained. 

He didn’t want to go home, not yet. His apartment was empty and quiet; he would be alone. In a way it would be a relief after spending so many hours surrounded by people. Solitude and quiet was a luxury, he knew that, but the quality of the silence of his apartment held an edge of malevolence. He knew that when he went home he would be listening closely to that silence, watching the corners of every room as he did his homework, prepared his meals, as he tried to sleep…

Better, he thought, to remain here for now. Better to put off the time he would have to face simultaneous loneliness and feeling like he was being watched in his own home. 

He had only just arrived in Domino and enrolled in this school, and he was already developing a reputation, even among those who didn’t know his secret. It was a reputation as a quiet loner, which either made him an unapproachable snob or a fascinating enigma depending on who you asked. Ryou didn’t really care. He had things to worry about other than his high school reputation. 

Like how long a chain link fence would keep him from falling. 

“Bakura?”

Ryou jumped, startled out of his contemplations. He looked around, ready to scurry off the roof with a teacher’s scolding following him. 

It wasn’t a teacher who stood at the door leading back inside. It was a boy his own age, hair spiked and dyed a variety of unnatural colors, a leather band at his throat and golden pendant at his chest. Ryou relaxed a little. It was just Yugi, one of his few friends. 

Yugi wasn’t likely to scold him for hanging around the school when he had no reason to… but what he _was_ likely to talk to him about might not be so much better. They were friends, and some recent events, while bringing them closer together, were apt to come up in awkward ways. Especially if Yugi saw or suspected why Ryou had decided to come up on the roof. He already looked concerned. His brows were drawn over his eyes, his mouth tugged into a frown which did not suit his face. His features were meant for smiles. A frown was foreign, unnatural on him. 

Not wanting to see such a dark look on Yugi’s face, or deal with the conversation which might stem from it, Ryou did his best to put on a smile of his own. “Hello, Yugi! What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” Yugi said without preamble. He stepped out onto the roof, closing the door behind him quietly and came to join him at the fence. “You’ve seemed distracted the last few days,” he said, his voice curiously low. It made Ryou tense unconsciously. “We saw you leave as soon as the bell rang and worried. Once the cleaning was done I came looking. I thought you would have gone straight home but your shoes were still in their cubby. Luckily I found someone who had seen you heading for the stairs before I’d searched the entire school.”

Ryou stared. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had taken so much trouble to be certain he was alright. He stared into Yugi’s eyes, who regarded him steadily, intently. Ryou had noticed before that Yugi’s eyes were an odd color, a dark violet shade like the color of the horizon as day shifted into night, just before the last memory of the sun faded away and the sky was taken over by the stars. Such a strange color to see naturally occur in someone’s eyes, yet as fascinated as Ryou was by it, he almost never got a chance to look for so long. Yugi was normally very shy, averting his eyes after only a few moments. Now he held Ryou’s gaze steadily, with no sign of self-consciousness. 

A realization came to Ryou, and he looked Yugi over again from head to toe. The way he stood, how he held his body, the way he _stared_ at Ryou, it was all unlike the boy he had come to know at school, but it was still familiar. 

“You’re the other one, aren’t you? The other Yugi, the one who saved us all.”

The frown softened slightly to make room for a half smile. “From what I recall,” he said, and there was no mistaking the change in the voice now that Ryou was listening for it, “we were all saved as much by your efforts and your sacrifice as by anything that I did that day.”

Ryou lowered his head, turning away from the violet stare which seemed to be staring straight into the back of his head. He felt trapped, his lungs squeezing tight. Yugi coming to find him would have been bad enough, but to have the spirit of the Puzzle self track him down? There was very little which he could possibly want to speak to Ryou about, a very limited number of subjects from which to pick from, and Ryou was not prepared to speak on any of them. It was hard enough to face his friends every day with a smile, let alone the person who had fought directly with the spirit that had taken over his body and nearly destroyed them all. What did the man who had saved them think of Ryou, the one who had harbored such an abominable presence?

“What else was I going to do?” He gave a small shrug. “I couldn’t just watch what was happening and not do anything. Not with everyone about to… It seemed like the only way.”

“And yet, even knowing all of that, there are plenty who would not have done as you had. There are few who would consider their own life, let alone their own soul a fair trade to save others he had just met. It takes someone of great strength to make that choice, Bakura.”

It was a little strange listening to the other Yugi speak. His voice was different from ‘normal’ Yugi’s; a touch deeper, perhaps, his consonants sharper, his sentences more direct. Right now, though, he spoke with a gentleness that was more suited to the normal Yugi. It was like he knew what was going through Ryou’s mind, and was trying to gentle him down, to ease the sting inside him that even he had not fully identified. It made him uncomfortable, exposed when all he wanted was to hide. 

He couldn’t think of any way to reply, no way to deny his supposed strength or to otherwise make light of the situation that still sat like an iron weight in his mind. So he just raised his eyes to look back over Domino City, not seeing it at all as the other Yugi stood beside him. He might decide to speak, but Ryou rather hoped that he would grow tired of standing in silence with him and go back inside, leaving him alone again. 

A small part of him hoped that he would stay. 

So it was with mixed feelings that he saw that the other Yugi showed no sign at all of returning inside. He stood beside Ryou, eyes fixed on the lengthening shadows of the city. Ryou wondered if he saw the view at all, or if like him it was all just an abstract mishmash of color and shape, with no reason holding it all together. 

The sun moved across the sky and the breeze grew even chillier, blowing in from the sea with the sharp tang of salt. 

“It is difficult, sometimes,” the other Yugi said eventually, his voice still soft, “to know where one’s own thoughts cease and those of another begin. When sharing a body and mind with another, it’s easy to mistake the other’s thoughts for your own. It’s a complex puzzle that one does in the dark, by feel alone, and can never be completely certain that they have completely solved it.”

Ryou kept silent a while, sorting through what he’d just been told, what had been implied. He snuck a look to the side, but Yugi was staring straight ahead, granting him the fragile kind of privacy that could be given when standing right beside someone. “Is that how it is with you and Yugi? You have to disentangle your thoughts to know one from the other?”

Out of his peripheral vision he saw Yugi’s lips curl into a fond smile. “Yugi believes that we are two sides of the same person. He thinks of me as ‘his other self,’ and doesn’t worry so much about drawing the line between one set of thoughts and another. For all that, though, we _are_ different people, with separate thoughts, separate drives and separate desires. It was actually you and the spirit of the Millennium Ring who showed me that, proved it more effectively than anything Yugi and I had been through before.”

Ryou tensed. It was the first time anyone had mentioned the Ring at all since the incident of the tabletop RPG. He knew the others assumed he had gotten rid of it after that day, but he hadn’t. He’d thought about it, but there seemed no practical way, and when it came right down to it… Ryou couldn’t bring himself to part with it. He didn’t quite know why, but he’d had it for so long, it was hard to imagine being without it. 

And he knew no one else would understand why he kept it.

He made a fist with his left hand. It still ached abominably from the healing wound given by a model tower piercing it clean through during that RPG. The punctures of the Ring’s spikes in his chest had already healed up, but they also ached. He could hardly blame anyone for not understanding his keeping the Ring, when he ought to have the most reason for getting rid of it. 

He tried to smile, felt like he failed in the endeavor. “I suppose if anything was going to convince you that two people were different, it would be when they were trying to kill each other.”

“You are not him, Bakura.” The other Yugi turned his head, once again fixing him with that odd, violet stare. Ryou did not meet it. “His actions and his choices are not your own, whatever it might _feel_ like. You are your own person. Do not carry guilt which is not yours to bear.”

When it felt like he could speak again without choking on the words, he turned to meet the other Yugi’s gaze. “I know we are not the same person,” he said, his voice suspiciously thick to his own ears. “He told me himself that he was a spirit trapped in the Millennium Ring. But… he was a part of me for so long. He hurt so many people through me, trapping them because he thought it was something that I _wanted_ \- that I would appreciate. ‘Granting wishes,’ he called it. I wished for friends, and that was how he gave them to me. As things. In a way, I feel like I _am_ guilty, that I’m responsible for all of what happened. And I worry,” he looked away, unable to hold the other Yugi’s eye as he admitted his greater fear. “I worry that his being with me for so long, a part of my mind, that he may have rubbed off on me. That I might… become like him. We didn’t start off the same, but we might end that way.”

There it was, not his only fear, but one of his greatest. The feeling that the only thing keeping him on one side of sanity and from falling down into the other was a thin membrane of logic and conviction. His own personal chain link fence holding him back from an unsurvivable fall. 

“Bakura.” A hand gripped Ryou’s arm, forced him very gently to turn and face him. The dark eyes were clouded, the frown returned. He stared at Ryou so intently it was hard to not look away from him. “The fact that you worry so much over becoming like him tells me that you are _not_ him. You are stronger than he was, Bakura. It was you who truly defeated him, and you did it through the greatest sacrifice anyone could ever make.”

“It was only because I felt guilty…” The confession was almost painful. 

“Did _he_ ever feel guilt, Bakura?” The question was quick, but still gentle. The way the other Yugi stared at him made him feel like a bug pinned to a board, but his voice was still as soft as before, comforting even as it asked him such probing questions. “Did he ever feel even a twinge of doubt over what he was doing, or an inkling of sympathy for those he hurt?”

Ryou shook his head. Their time of sharing a single headspace had been relatively short, but that was one question Ryou knew the answer to without doubt. The other soul had felt nothing for his victims but disdain for their weakness and satisfaction when he conquered them. “No.”

“Can you imagine yourself ever feeling as he did, or imagine that he would have done as you had? I cannot. You are as unlike that other soul as I can imagine it is possible to be.”

“But all those other souls, the ones he trapped because I wished for friends. What if- What if I really _did_ wish for them to be with me forever, the way he gave them to me?”

Yugi’s stare remained steady on him, and then softened into something else, something less intense, and more… fond. Ryou became aware of the warmth seeping into his arm from Yugi’s hand, still on him. “Why are you so determined to make yourself the villain, Bakura? Is your guilt so precious to you that you would go to such lengths to hold on to it? It won’t do, you know. It doesn’t suit you at all.”

The other Yugi raised a hand, brushing back a lock of Ryou’s hair from his face. It was easier to see him then, and for him to see Ryou, with less to hide behind. Ryou wondered how effective any disguise would be with him. This spirit seemed able to see into him even more effectively than the one that had shared his mind. 

“You are perhaps the gentlest soul I have ever met,” he said. “The gentlest and the strongest. You have no reason to fear becoming as that other spirit. It is so contrary to who and what you are, your very nature would reject it.”

Ryou’s heart squeezed in an odd way, making him catch his breath. “You believe that? Really?”

The hand at his arm gripped a little harder, he nodded. “Yes. I do.”

The smile that came to Ryou’s face was tentative, but the first genuine one he had worn in what felt like weeks. The other Yugi returned it, and some of the weight that had been sitting on him for so long at last lifted. 

They remained on the roof a while longer, watching the shadows deepen, listening to the athletic club go through their routines. When they decided to leave they did so together, and the other Yugi walked with him until their paths had to diverge towards their separate homes. Ryou felt the loss of the other soul’s presence immediately, but he did not feel so alone as he had on the roof. There was someone who understood, who saw his struggle and reached out to him. 

He wasn’t as alone as he had thought. 

Walking back to his apartment, he tried not to think of the Millennium Ring still sitting atop his dresser, or what the other Yugi would say if he knew he still had it. 

How certain would he be that Ryou was so unlike the other spirit if he knew that he couldn’t get rid of the one thing that posed the largest threat to his sense of self?

**Author's Note:**

> I may eventually add some more parts to this showing other high points in the relationship as the canon progresses, but no real plans as yet. For now, this will remain 'complete' and maybe we'll get some surprise chapters later.


End file.
